Attack from both sides

This photo was one of the winners at the Yahoo! Photo Mail contest. Needless to say it gave me a good laugh.
Enjoy.

Farhan

CSS border bottom

To apply bottom border using CSS, use
border-bottom: 1px solid #000000;

And this is how it will look like

favicon.ico : FavIcon from Pics

Found this great resource that lets you easily create favicon for your web site. After downloading the favicon, just upload it to the root directory and voila! your favicon.ico will start showing up

FavIcon from Pics -- how to create a favicon.ico for your website

The Reasons why China Scares the US

I came acrss this very interesting article by Will Hutton about why China scares the US as the US deficit reaches record high. The article talks about how China has been replacing products worldwide, yet they don't have a single brand name that can be considered big according to the US standards.

Taipei Times - archives: "It doesn't matter that after 25 years of near 10 percent growth that has created a US$2 trillion economy, most people still can't name a single Chinese brand, and that its aspirant multinationals -- Lenovo, Huawei, Haier -- are tiny by western standards. By this stage in its growth path, Japan was boasting Sony, Honda, JVC and Toyota, to name but a few -- a telling comparison about China's genuine autonomous economic strength."

What surprises me is that it shouldn't be China alone. India is one of the biggest threats too to the US economy. And with a $3 billion hardware center being planned there, the threat is only going to increase.

--Frank

India China US deficit

US trade deficit hits $617.6 billion, an all-time high

This is a sad day for US.

AP Wire | 02/10/2006 | U.S. trade deficit hits all-time high: "The Commerce Department reported Friday that the gap between what America sells abroad and what it imports rose to $725.8 billion last year, up by 17.5 percent from the previous record of $617.6 billion set in 2004.

It marked the fourth consecutive year that America's trade deficit has set a record as American consumers continued their seemingly insatiable demand for all things foreign from new cars to televisions and electronic goods."

What can I say? The government is too busy focusing on it's own agenda rather than pay attention to the country's economics. Yesterday I heard $3bn hardware center being developed in India. Everything is being outsourced and people are becoming jobless.

Sad day.

Farhan

Is Firefox better than Internet Explorer? I don't think so

Yes, you heard it right. I don't think Firefox is a better browser than Internet Explorer. It's probably the worst browser programming wise. Why? Because I have never come across a browser so full of bugs and incompatibilities. Worse, it's a memory hog. There, I said it.

Adding functionality to Firefox is like a joke. One day you add something, the next day it becomes incompatible.

Just today my wife upgraded her Firefox installation from 1.5 to 1.5.0.1 and her installed toolbar stopped working.

In case you missed it, that was an upgrade from 1.5 to 1.5.0.1. Supposedly a minor upgrade.

The incompatibilities don't end here. Seems like the mission of Firefox developers is to waste the time and productivity of people using it and programmers developing products for it.

Don't take me wrong, If you are a single home user who visits less than 10 unique web sites a day, Firefox is the excellent choice. But if you are a serious surfer like me, you'll have to wait for a better browser (if that will ever come).

The other day I checked how much memory Firefox was using and to my horror it was using 396MB of RAM.

In addition, I strongly believe that Firefox has the worst exception handling ever. It just dies. No warning, no error, just death.

Programmers and developers spend their valuable time making extensions for this browser only to find that every single upgrade (no matter how big or small) will make their work incompatible.

It looks like Google has hired the main software engineer and put him on other tasks. Google, please return the Firefox guy so he can complete his work in progress, or at least guide the other people who are still working in the dark.

I have just had it with this browser. Seems like the worst case scenario of an Open Source Project where people are just adding code without having any authority checking it.

So here's the verdict: Firefox sucks equally as Internet Explorer. In this case Open Source is no better than proprietary software. They both suck.

And what's up with the IE folks? Seems like Microsoft is just cutting them checks without getting any productivity back. I mean Microsoft really needs to hire a few "really brilliant brains" to help them get back in the market. Or may be they have accepted their loss and are just going to let it go. Redmond, you can do better than this.

Farhan
Tags: Microsoft Redmond FirefoxInternet Explorer Ballmer

Colors and Gradients

Here are some cool colors that caught my attention recently:

#536660


#22343C


To create a gradient in Photoshop using the two colors,
1. create a new document
2. Press 'G' for gradient tool
3. holding the shift key, click and drag

Following is the gradient I created:



More variations and colors:
#22263C


#535366


gradient:


Colors:
#B8E100 [To catch attention]

#E1D000

#00B4E1

#3BB000 [The tech green made famous by Technorati]

#B00003

#000CB0


#f1f4e9 [A subtle color to be used for extra space that can be used the background]


#E9F4EC


#ECE9F4



#E9F3F4



Accidental gradient:
3BB000 B8E100


223C2A-596653



For buttons try: 230 x 41